Contraband Pb [Paperback]

George Foy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1998

The most dangerous commodity of all...

Joe "Skid" Marak, aka the pilot, is a compulsive smuggler.  For him, borders are an outrage to freedom.  He lives with his pet rat in the abandoned spire of Manhattan's TransCom Building.  His friends are outcasts in a world ripped by plague and repression.  The pilot knows his days are numbered.  On his ECM-pak, he watches helplessly as his freetrading comrades vanish from the screen: victims of a mysterious force known only as "Bokon Taylay."

The brother of his Rollerblading, go-go-dancing girlfriend is Taylay's latest victim.  All that is left behind is a smuggled message telling the pilot he must locate the one man who can break Taylay's code, the legendary author of the Smuggler's Bible--a man who may not even exist.  It's a risk worth taking.  Because to the pilot, there's only one contraband more valuable than life--freedom.


From the Paperback edition.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Even for a smuggler, the Pilot lives on the edge. There seems to be no vehicle he can't master and eventually destroy in the pursuit of his career, yet he never misses an issue of The Smuggler's Bible. When a mysterious man (or force) known as "Bokon Taylay" begins to take out all of the smugglers one by one, only the Pilot escapes Bokon's ever-tightening net. To save his comrades and keep the "free trader" lifestyle alive, the Pilot decides he must track down Forrest Hawkley, the (possibly mythical) man behind The Smuggler's Bible itself. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

A slog through heavy near-future grunge, from the author of the much better The Shift (1996). In Foy's dull scenario, pollution and climatic change have distorted socioeconomic systems worldwide; in America, BON--the Bureau of Nationalizations--has taken over most of active government. Josef Marak, known as ``the pilot,'' is one of a dwindling band of dedicated smugglers whose most important tool, the on-line, updated Smuggler's Bible, is maintained by Forrest Hawkley Stanhope--but nobody knows who, or where, Hawkley is. Recently, smuggling has become all but impossible, thanks to a new detection system run by the mysterious Bokon Taylay. So the pilot and his friends Rocketman and PC, along with his pet rat God, grab Hawkley's daughter Ela in the hope that she can help them find Hawkley. After a long, twisting, difficult journey across Asia, complicated by a suspected mole among them, they catch up with Hawkley, and he duly shows them how to defeat Taylay. Gritty and sometimes dark-edged; but, with cardboard eccentrics instead of characters and no plot worth mentioning, the story merely sprawls in an indifferent heap. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 517 pages
• Publisher: Bantam (May 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553506293
• ISBN-13: 978-0553506297
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,808,496 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars fast and dense, January 1, 1998

By 

Wine Guy (Texas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Contraband (Bantam Spectra Book) (Paperback)

a quick, clever book, hewing to the best of the noirish traditions of cyberpunk. criticizing the plotting (which i really rather liked) and characterizations misses the point; the meat of the story resides in the hallucinatory feel of the pilot's life and reality, the fine attention to his consciousness and the gradations of change which it undergoes in this fine "journey" novel. the pilot functions at the edge, which, as the author reminds us, is where almost everything interesting happens . . . and where authority, in all its guises, wants to keep its subjects from venturing.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Contraband, June 10, 2002

By 

K. Freeman (Apple Valley, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Contraband (Bantam Spectra Book) (Paperback)

Intelligent, stylish and well-realized near-future SF. Foy does well at portraying popular culture and infusing humor. His writing here is often beautiful.

Contraband, the story of a pilot in a world where secret cargo cults do battle with governnment agencies, follows one of the cargo cult philosophies: the journey is the destination. The plot is circular, and not especially strong. Still, the reasonably appealing characters, the original worldbuilding, and the strength of Foy's language carry the reader along.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A superb technothriller quest!, August 13, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Contraband (Mass Market Paperback)

A wonderful novel about what technology enables the power structure--and the individual--to accomplish, told through the quest of a small band of people seeking their own freedom. Highly readable, blending a nice sense of computer-based semi-magical realism ("Any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic", to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke), this is a book that stays in your memory, both for its attention to detail (believability) and its themes.